Elias Maria Reti is a 1956 born german artist. His grandfather was the famous hungarian chess player Richard Rèti.
At the age of one year his parants who were involved into the hungarian revolution were killed.
In the same year he was adopted by a german family and renamed into Elias Neumann.
At end of the sixties Reti was working with his uncle Hannes Neumann in a travelling cirkus. They travelled with the cirkus through France, Italy and Germany.
During his work there he meet Pablo Picasso.
1970 his uncle Hannes hat a fatal accident.
After the dead of his uncle Elias Maria left the circus and started to study art in the class of Jesoph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Duesseldorf.
After Joseph Beuys was suspended in the year 1972 Elias Maria Reti went to East Germany where he spend the next three years. At that time he married the polish actress Danuta Kolarska.
1975 he and Danuta Kolarska went to New York, where he met Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente.
1980 he came back to Cologne in Germany and transformed his New York Style into a new form which was in Germany called Junge Wilde.
1985 he found his wife Danuta Kolarska dead in a hotal in East Berlin. A few days later Reti was arrested and until 1999 in a prison in East Berlin. Since that time he seemed to be forgotten for the art world.
2001 he was released from the prison. 2001-2008 he lived in a psychiatric ward in Eas Berlin.
Since 2008 he is free and lives in Berlin. His paintings are ver often scenes from his life.
He usually uses the colours white, blue, red and gray which are -as he says- the tears, blood, lost homes and the innocence he saw in his life.